Mr. Vy walked calmly toward the Red Queen, extended his arm and snapped off a round. The body jerked. He stepped closer, bent slightly, and fired again, this time at her head—pop. We stood there like fools, dumbstruck.
The car pulled up and the pretend priests got in back. Mr. Vy hoisted the heavy valise into the trunk and got in front, the driver sliding over to let him take the wheel.
Crouch spat in the direction of the retreating automobile. “You’re fuckin’ welcome.”
Robeson was giddy with adrenaline. His right pant leg oozed blood from his groin all the way to his boot. I made him lie down, using the bench to elevate his leg. Rider knelt and ripped open Robeson’s pant leg to apply a field dressing. I held a flashlight on his thigh and a bandage to my mangled earlobe, grateful she hadn’t torn my face off. Rider pressed a dressing hard against Robeson’s groin.
The firing around the palace grew louder. Red tracers whizzed by overhead, shearing off high branches around us and making the soaked trees smolder.
“How bad?” Robeson said, high as a kite, flirting with shock and laughing, happy to be alive, terrified to have been in the Red Queen’s sights.
“Not bad,” Rider answered. “All meat.” The first dressing was already soaked. He lifted it off to apply another and froze. “Shit.”
“What?”
He leaned close to me. “Nicked his scrotum too.”
“Am I gonna die, Ellie?” Robeson moaned, trembling like he was cold, sensing all the blood exiting. “Sweet God in heaven.”
“Clovis,” I barked. “You’ll be fine.”
I sent Crouch to hustle back to the blind to radio for a medic. Rider pressed a second bandage against Robeson’s crotch but Robeson kept tugging at it.
“Stop messing with the bandage,” Rider snapped, “or I’ll tourniquet your dick.”
Crouch waved from the blind and mimed that the T-11 had taken a hit. We had no commo. I made driving motions. “Get the jeep!” He gave me a thumbs-up, jettisoned his helmet and harness, and ran.
“This is payback for the sentry and the pig, ain’t it, Sarge,” Robeson sputtered.
“He’s delirious,” Rider bitched and stuck him with a syrette. He painted M for morphine on Robeson’s fatigues with a bloody finger and a second one on his forehead for good measure. The rain smudged both in an instant.
The palace fighting surged again. “Has the bleeding stopped?” I shouted in Rider’s ear.
He shook his head no, still pushing down on the bandage. Even in the din, I heard Crouch roaring toward us like a madman, pedal to the floor. He fishtailed through the bridle path and was on us in seconds.
I helped ease Robeson into the back as they made ready to race him to the naval hospital by the rail station. Thank God, it was close. Rider jumped on ass-first, feet dangling over the side, still pressing the bandage hard. “Send somebody back for me,” I shouted and the jeep sped away, rooster-tailing mud.
I could feel blood dripping onto my shoulder from my torn ear. An inch to the right, the round would have cracked open my skull. I slumped down next to the Queen. We had risked ourselves to stop her and she had hurt us bad, yet I felt oddly defeated that she’d failed.
Her cloth saddlebag held extra clips and the Queen’s calling card. I slipped the card into the breast pocket of my fatigues and retrieved the Radom pistol from under her hand. Beneath the translucent grip was a familiar picture of a seated woman surrounded by her three children.
Uncapping my flashlight, I illuminated the Red Queen’s face and sucked air. Blood seeped from her cheek, her lips, teeth. The bullet to the back of the head had exited through an eye and taken part of her cheek, its flesh now hanging loose. There’d been no call for those shots from Diem’s bodyguard. I hated Vy for needlessly disfiguring her. She was no longer the elegant Red Queen in the flowing ao dai. I reached to straighten her tangled, bloody hair. All of it came away in my hand.
Chapter Forty-Five
A wig—the hair beneath it just as black but shorter. No longer a Queen, now a One-Eyed Jack. It took only a moment to see she’d been both all along: the innocent angel shooting Americans dead with unreal skill, and the swaggering rider trailing Lodge to the cemetery; the tender beauty in the photo Furth carried in his wallet, and the fey young assistant standing next to Emily Lodge in the ambassador’s residence.
I looked again at the photo under the Radom’s grip. The Red Queen was not Mai Nguyen—Mai, like her younger sister, must have perished in the inferno in Tay Ninh. The teenage brother was the child who had survived. Already wanted by the police, he must have saved himself by slipping away disguised in his sister’s clothes. Mr. Ma had told us Huyen was the Red Queen’s mentor. No doubt Huyen had helped him perfect the illusion, adding gesture and movement to transform his young innocence into female beauty. Captain Ting thought the young lover who siphoned the life out of General Lang had vanished like a quỉ. But while Ting’s men were looking for the Red Queen, she had simply walked away unnoticed as a man.
Yet in my imagination, the Red Queen was still the daring heroine striking down her enemies with impossible shots. Without mercy or remorse she’d drained every last measure of life out of the man who had brought hellfire down on her beloved family. And she’d almost had her vengeance on the self-righteous holy Joe who’d ordered the exterminations. She hadn’t counted on us lying in wait to ambush her. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Ma, she could easily have killed Mr. Vy and Nhu and the Americans’ Old Fox, President Diem, even escaping to ambush Lodge another day. The Reds would have hung her image in some hall of heroes and proselytized youngsters with stories of her daring.
I closed the remaining eye and covered the face. I cut away the ao dai down to the padding underneath, took the shoes and the bloody wig, shoving it all into my rucksack. My brain was nearly too fried to function, yet I knew I didn’t want the Red Queen mutilated any further or ridiculed in defeat. I retrieved a blanket from our emplacement and wrapped the body tightly, head to foot.
The fighting slacked off a bit. The siege would ratchet up again when more ammo arrived for the attackers. In my exhaustion, I wondered if anyone defending the place knew that Diem was no longer there. But of course they didn’t or the fighting would have stopped.
I crawled back into our position and lay down under the fronds. Protected by the dark, I fell asleep in seconds. I didn’t stir until a tremendous roar of howitzer blasts banged my chest like a drumhead. Those had to be going directly into the building. Tank guns and .50s spit streams of bullets into the masonry, shredding doors, windows, defenders. Mortars lobbed rounds, artillery boomed. I lay on the crest of the hillock and watched the continuous lightning halo the palace like searchlights at some Hollywood opening.
The gas tank or ammo in an armored carrier touched off and blew straight upward in a flaming ball that topped the roofs.
Rider reappeared with the jeep. “They stopped the bleeding,” he shouted into my ear. “They’re transfusing and stabilizing Robeson before surgery.”
I nodded and breathed easier.
We loaded the wrapped corpse on board and drove along utterly empty streets. Rider said a Catholic colonel named Thieu was leading the assault on the palace and “gettin’ it done.” Clever of the Buddhist generals to have a Catholic make the direct assault, he said.
We left the anonymous body at St. Paul’s Hospital morgue. I dropped Rider at the Majestic and headed to the embassy residence to report. It was a little before five and dimly light. The dozen Marine guards were still at their posts, groggy after their long night. A pair of them greeted me with shotguns leveled.
“You’re back,” said the corporal.
“No keeping me away,” I replied.
The muzzles dipped and the jarhead waved me past the gate. Another set of leathernecks guarded the front door. I found Mike Dunn inside, bleary-eyed and still working the phones.
Dunn told me about more phone calls between Diem and General Don, more attempts to bargain. Don reminded Diem of the many opportunities he’d had to change his ways, the fortunes his family had made at the expense of the country. Diem expressed no remorse. He wanted to exit in style. He expected appropriate transport, time to collect his personal effects, and deference accorded in keeping with his position: he wanted an honor guard.
Like the rebel generals, Conein and Dunn assumed Diem was telephoning from the palace. I explained I had seen him leave during the night, after we thwarted a VC attack on the escaping president. Dunn came fully awake and rushed me upstairs to inform Lodge. Coup or no coup, the ambassador had turned in at his usual hour, but was now back on the portico, taking in the eruptions of the fighting. I delivered the news that Diem was in the wind.
Head bent, Lodge ordered Dunn to convey the information to the Joint General Staff headquarters. No thanks, no nothin’. He barely looked at me. I started to tell him about the Red Queen but stopped myself.
Dunn got right on the horn with Conein, who was still with the generals, and asked him to alert General Minh. Shaking his head, he hung up.
“Big Minh refuses to believe Diem’s not in Gia Long. Minh called the palace and spoke with the president a number of times.”
Fool, I thought, the connection was patched through the palace switchboard to wherever they were hiding out in the world, something they must have planned long in advance. At a quarter to six several reports came in that the palace defenders had run up a white flag, then shot and killed a rebel captain who’d come to take their surrender, whether by accident or out of malice nobody knew. But the siege was over, and rebel soldiers were already ransacking and plundering the building. Madame Nhu’s collection of silk negligees and her husband’s stock of liquor went first. China and curtains were being carted away, along with a black marble sink and pink bathtub.
“To the victor the souvenirs,” Dunn quoted Conein saying, as a grinning soldier skipped by Lulu wearing a mink stole, his buddy draped in one of the tiger-skin rugs lifted off Madame Nhu’s floor.
They were totting up casualties at the palace while Big Minh stood by in full dress uniform with a felt-topped table prepared to take Diem’s signature of surrender in front of the press and the world. His troops searched every corner. No Diem. No Nhu. South Vietnamese soldiers lay dead and wounded from attacking and defending an empty palace. Sacrificed for nothing. Standing in the debris, cheated of his moment, made to look a fool, Big Minh grew furious. Having lost face, Conein reported, Big Minh had raced back to his headquarters in a rage.
Lodge’s other aide, Fred Flott, had just volunteered to go to the palace to verify Diem was missing when Diem telephoned. Lodge stepped to the phone. Dunn and I got on the extension.
“Where are you, Mr. President?” Lodge said.
“At St. Francis Xavier Church in Chợ Lớn. We have attended mass. Our confessions have been heard. We have received absolution and taken communion.”
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“If you send a car we would avail ourselves of your earlier invitation to leave. You mentioned a plane at Tân Sơn Nhứt.”
“Ah,” Lodge said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m afraid there’s a complication. The closest long-range aircraft available is a KC-135 in Okinawa.”
Dunn and I exchanged a look. The aircraft he’d originally offered, the one sent to take Lodge to Washington, had a luxury interior. Wasn’t it still on the tarmac, fueled and waiting? Certainly General Harkins’s plane was there. What Lodge was saying was nuts. Why would he send a head of state into exile aboard a Stratotanker, a flying gas station designed for aerial refueling?
“We can’t get that plane here until tomorrow,” Lodge went on.
“I see.”
“Mr. President,” Lodge said, “I have to step away for a moment.” He handed the receiver to Mike while he went to a different phone in the living room. Was he calling Lulu to pass along Diem’s whereabouts?
Mike Dunn was speaking with Diem in English. Diem said he and Nhu had driven to the home of a Chinese trader in Chợ Lớn, a Mr. Ma Tuyen, who had served them tea and soup, sheltering them until morning, when they’d driven to church for early mass.
Dunn covered the mouthpiece and said, “Ma Tuyen is chief of the five associations that control the Chinese districts. He’s supposed to be Nhu’s connection to the Cholon drug syndicates that help finance the military and Nhu’s enormous army of secret police snitches.”
I nodded but didn’t mention that Mr. Ma and I were acquainted.
Mike’s two boys came barreling down the stairs, fingers cocked, shooting with loud bangs as they roared through, barely keeping their oversized flak jackets in place.
Diem spoke: “Time has run out for us. It is the day after All Saints, second of November. The Feast of the Dead.”
The ambassador was coming back.
“Dies irae,” Diem said. “Dies illa.” He rang off.
Dunn and I exchanged a look. We both recognized the Latin. I’d learned it as an altar boy at St. Monica’s: That day is a day of wrath.
Colonel Dunn extended a hand toward Lodge. “Let me take the embassy limo. They’re twenty minutes away. Big Minh isn’t onto them yet.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said, and took up my weapon.
“Your plane is still on call, sir,” Dunn said, barely keeping the plea out of his voice. “We’ll take him and Nhu straight to Tan Son Nhut. We’ll see them to Manila.”
“No.” Lodge brushed off the suggestion.
“Sir?”
“We can’t get involved.”
Flott said, “Washington doesn’t want him setting up a government in exile anywhere in the Pacific region.”
Dunn blinked nervously. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s the latest word from DC,” Flott went on. “Diem must fly nonstop to Europe or to South America.”
Dunn held his forehead like he was pushing back the thoughts also rushing through my mind. “Big Minh is livid,” he said. “There isn’t time to line up an asylum country to accept them. They’d be safe with us in the embassy until we finalized something. Left out there they won’t last long enough for a plane to come get them.”
Lodge stood firm. Diem was off his mandarin’s throne. The ambassador no longer needed him to cooperate about anything. I remembered Lodge’s firm handshake with Big Minh over the tennis net. Lodge would be dealing with his tennis partner from here on. Diem’s day was over.
“They’ll kill him,” Dunn said.
“We’re not to get involved,” Lodge repeated.
The broken pieces kaleidoscoped together. In exile, Diem and Counselor Nhu would be a liability, endlessly intriguing to regain power. The pair needed to go permanently. And whatever happened to one of them needed to happen to both.
Dumb me. When the mutineers’ resolve had seemed to waver and it looked like a coup might never happen, Lodge had pulled CIA back from pursuing the Red Queen. He’d tried to delay our search for her too, taking me away to Dalat, diverting us with a summons to the ambassador’s residence. With the coup looking shaky, he needed her in the game. She was the fallback play. If the rebels did not screw up their courage and act, he needed her to be able to do her worst unimpeded.
Had Diem died at her hands, Washington would’ve been privately relieved and publicly blameless, as innocent as the diplomat well known to be next on her to-die list. Robeson and me, we were pawns who advanced too far. We should have come off the board sooner.
Chapter Forty-Six
The Dunn kids turned in their steel helmets and flak vests and surrendered to their mother for a bath in the iron tub that had been their trench. The coup was over, the regime officially toppled.
At his rooftop apartment atop the Italian embassy on rue Pasteur, Ambassador d’Orlandi c
ould finally conclude the lunch he had sat down to the previous day when ministers from Diem’s cabinet had appeared at the embassy door begging for asylum. Getting his government’s official consent would have taken too long, so he’d invited them in for a meal where they’d officially be safely on Italian soil. The lunch had lasted all night.
Lucien Conein was exhausted. Before the coup, Lulu had managed to keep his involvement with the mutineers cloaked by meeting in secret with General Don at their mutual dentist’s office on rue Catinat and other equally innocent locations. Conein had requisitioned funds from the Big Rock Candy Mountain and kept his personal safe stocked with neat 250,000-piaster bundles. He’d arrived at the conspirators’ headquarters with five million piasters in cash to pay the coup forces and cover condolence payments to families of any soldiers who died in the attempt. No doubt the promise of cash had given courage to any officers who remained on the fence.
When Conein heard the press was on its way to the rebels’ headquarters, he retreated quietly to preserve his anonymity in the affair. He went home to relieve the Special Forces team that had been protecting his wife and infant daughter in his absence. But before he got the chance to finally close his eyes and sleep, the embassy abruptly rousted him.
Upsetting intel had reached the White House. They wanted President Diem’s status confirmed. Conein hustled back to the Joint Chiefs’ headquarters. Diem and Nhu had taken poison, he was told. Did he want to see?
See?
Their bodies were out back.
Fuck no, Conein did not want to see their corpses or play any part in certifying their deaths. Although he had helped launch and finance the coup, he wanted no overt connection with it, most especially not with this ridiculous cover story of self-murder. The fairy tale of two devoutly religious Catholics committing suicide was patent nonsense, soon demonstrated by a published photo showing them badly mauled, their hands tied behind them. The Red Queen would have been quick. Whoever had done this had taken his time.
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